Good to Great
The Challenge: Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study: For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards: Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric,
Where Good to Great keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
Books in conversation with Good to Great
A few of the closest reads from our full list.
What you might want to know about Good to Great
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A research team studies eleven public companies that beat their industry by huge margins for at least fifteen years. The book lays out the patterns: Level 5 leaders, hedgehog focus, and the flywheel.
Good to Great identifies what distinguishes companies that make sustained leaps in performance from those that stay merely good. Jim Collins's research team studied 28 companies over five years, identifying frameworks like Level 5 Leadership, the Hedgehog Concept, and the Flywheel Effect.
Good to Great remains widely read, but several of its featured companies (including Circuit City and Fannie Mae) have since collapsed or struggled, raising questions about the methodology. The frameworks remain influential even where the case studies have not aged well.
Good to Great was written by Jim Collins, published in 2001 by HarperCollins Publishers.
Good to Great is 320 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Good to Great takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Good to Great is a standalone novel by Jim Collins, not part of a series.
Good to Great is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
